And the 2017 San Diego people of the year are ...

We know too little about the 20 people whose deaths were tied to last year’s unprecedented local hepatitis A outbreak, which caught city and county officials so off-guard that they had to abandon vague, bureaucratic talking points and less ambitious goals about helping the homeless and scramble to address a problem rooted in years of neglect.

Seventeen were men and three were women. Eleven were homeless, one was an illicit drug user and three others were both. They died between Feb. 25 and Oct. 26, ranged in age from 35 to 81, and had 1,136 years of cumulative time on planet Earth — an average of 56 years and 10 months each. But San Diego County officials refuse to release their names or other information about them even though their lives merited more than statistics and their deaths make details crucial to members of the public.

The fiasco was San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Flint, Michigan, a crisis that could have been avoided had government done its job protecting people. But there’s enough blame that the City Council and county supervisors deserve some, too.

Across America, there have been other examples where people died from government neglect, but such deaths are often sudden. The 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire and the 2003 West Warwick, Rhode Island, Station nightclub fire, for example. Here there were warning signs for years that San Diego’s hepatitis A outbreak — or something like it — was inevitable with more and more homeless people living closer and closer together with fewer and fewer public bathrooms in downtown San Diego.

These 20 hepatitis A deaths represent the real cost of a series of public policy errors, missteps and inaction. While there has always been some pressure on city and county leaders to find short-term and long-term housing solutions, these 20 lives are largely the reason that 700 homeless San Diegans can now find shelter in three massive tent structures downtown and that hundreds more homeless residents have hand-washing stations and bathrooms available to them on city streets that have fewer homeless camps on them. After a history of dragging their feet, city officials quickly opened a city-sanctioned homeless encampment and expanded safe parking spacesfor people living in cars this fall. The life-or-death stakes lent an urgency to 2017 that had been missing.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board chooses these nameless, voiceless individuals as our 2017 people of the year. Even with what little we know about them, their impact is undeniable.

County officials wouldn’t even say much about patient zero, only that he’s a homeless man who tested positive for hepatitis A at a La Mesa hospital after an exposure period that was mainly in El Cajon. For geographic details, the county has only shared a breakdown of 577 confirmed cases by ZIP code. It shows 94 — the highest number by far — were downtown, another sign city officials should be ashamed they ignored numerous warnings about how a lack of restrooms could fuel a public health emergency.

It was only after media attention in late August and early September began a cavalcade of bad press that Faulconer, the San Diego City Council and the county Board of Supervisors showed any sense of urgency for this emergency. “Entirely avoidable and readily fixable,” U-T columnist Dan McSwain wrote in January of San Diego’s homeless crisis. Without these deaths, it’s unsettling to think that bureaucrats would have bungled along, moving slowly to address homeless issues worsened by their inaction.

Sadly, the deaths are already overshadowed by the 45 people the county says have died from influenza since July, including 34 this week. The 20 hepatitis A victims deserve our undying thanks. We won’t forget them even if the county won’t identify them.